http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |(MCT) Shh  Web Search is trying to count today. OK, so maybe it's these websites that are doing the counting. That's just as well, because these sites are all concerned with tracking things you typically wouldn't consider from a quantity standpoint. Are you ready? 1, 2, 3 ...

How Much Is Inside? is goofy, funny and super-spiffy. Really, how many websites can you say that about? A brilliant concept by Rob Cockerham, How Much Is Inside? analyzes common consumer products such as a can of Easy Cheese, a jar of salsa or a keg of beer as it seeks to answer the question. Some of the results are intentionally obtuse, such as the revelation that an 8-ounce squirt can of processed Easy Cheese yields "about a cup of goo." Others are hilarious in their execution and definitive in their results. A 24-ounce jar of salsa is enough to dip 79 tortilla chips, determined by a scientific process whose methodology includes the rule "Keep off the new carpet in the living room." The keg-testing party I mean, experiment  determined that one half-barrel serves 141 cups of beer at 62 cents each. "In our experiment, two guests passed out and two guests threw up," Cockerham says in his narrative. "Whenever you are serving this much beer, it is a good idea to have either snack-foods on hand or paramedics on duty."

Where Did the Time Go? is a time-wasting website that promotes a U.K.-based broadband company, but it's a lot of fun for us Yanks, too. You fill in your name, age, gender and number of kids on an interactive form. Then you adjust sliding scales between extremes in categories such as "workaholic"/"chocoholic,"wholemeal"/"Happy Meal" and "40 laps/"40 winks." There are Britishisms  "off the market"/"on the pull" referring to marital status and "P for promotion"/"P45" referring to job security. Give it all a go, and you'll get the intangible results. For example, I have spent 12.1 years "getting some shut-eye" and am an "80% busy bee." I could use a few more years of sleep.

Alan Taylor's MegaPenny Project uses the 1-cent coin to help visualize numbers so large that we often don't take time to think of how much they really express. For example, 10 million pennies would form a 6-foot cube, which is shown in the illustration below with an average man pictured for scale. All the pennies in circulation, about 140 billion, would nearly fill a football field and stack more than 12 stories high. It would take more than 1.8 trillion pennies to fill the Empire State Building. Consider all of this the next time someone says, "A penny for your thoughts."

Here's an age calculator that will tell you how old you are down to the second. What makes this one different from most is that it allows you to enter the time of your birth for more accuracy. The results continue to generate in real time after you press the Find Your Age button, including a countdown to your next birthday. This would be a fun site to have guests try during a birthday celebration.

How many others of you are there? Find out with the U.S. Census Bureau's name-search site. Enter your first or last name, and the results will show you how many other people share the moniker and how it ranks among the U.S. population. Then you'll know how much you really count.

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Randy A. Salas is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Do you have a favorite Web site or a question about how to find something on the Internet? Send a note by clicking here.